Are safe deposit boxes all they're cracked up to be? When it comes to hiding valuables I've heard it all; tin cans of cash buried in the backyard, diamonds stitched into the curtain hems, illegal items not just under the mattress but in the mattress. Everyone wants to keep their treasures safe.
"End-of-life wishes and funeral arrangements are of little value if they're hidden away in a safe deposit box no one can access"
If you have valuable, hard-to-replace, or sentimental items it can be hard to know where to keep them safe. Maybe you've considered buying a safe or keeping valuables stashed in a vault behind a portrait of Great Aunt Doris.
If you prefer to err on the side of security or don't fancy your family selling your house with thousands of dollars of cash stuffed in the walls (a quick google will tell you it's more common than you may think), you might be more inclined to get yourself a safe deposit box.
Safe deposit boxes are:
- Designed to withstand natural disasters such as fires, floods and hurricanes
- Able to be held by co-signatories so you're not the only person able to access your information
- Located in the vaults of high security, insured institutions with alarms and cameras
This makes them ideal for housing physical items that are hard to replace or contain sensitive information such as contracts, collectibles, family heirlooms, hard drives with backups, and photographs.
Whilst safe deposit boxes are a great way to protect items away from your home (particularly good if like me you live in a bushfire area) they're not suitable for EVERYTHING. And can be a nightmare to access after your death.
5 Items you SHOULDN'T store in a safe deposit box
Documents you may need in a hurry or that will need to be accessed by your Powers of Attorney or Executors should never be added to your safe deposit box. These include:
1. Originals of your Will
If you die it's almost impossible for your family to access your safe deposit box, and thus the only copy of your will. It's better to keep the original of your will with your lawyer or in a home safe and tell a trusted relative or friend where they are and how to access them.
2. Advanced Care Directives & Power of Attorney paperwork
Should you become incapacitated your family will want to access your Advanced Care Directive and any know who you have nominated as your Power of Attorney. These are documents that are again better kept with your lawyer or in a home safe.
3. End-of-life and funeral arrangements
Gaining access to another person's safe deposit box after their death or incapacitation can take a long time (if you get access at all), living wills, end-of-life wishes and funeral arrangements are of little value if they're hidden away in a safe deposit box no one can access, so keep them where someone can find them.
4. Your passport
Safe deposit boxes can only be opened during bank hours, which means if you needed to leave the country in a hurry to get to a sick relative or friend, present identification, or take advantage of a crazy sale on flights to Bali, you'd be stuck waiting until the bank opened again Monday morning.
5. Cash
Many banks prohibit the storage of cash, but even if it's allowed federally insured banks and credit unions protect up to $250,000 per depositor per bank, whereas the cash in your safe deposit box is not covered by any kind of insurance. If the assets being stored are for "emergency" purposes, you'll be left hoping your emergency happens on a weekday between 10am and 4pm.
What about your digital belongings?
Just like a bank safe deposit box, Morty was created in response to the growing need for a safe and secure way to store and access digital information. Morty is a safe deposit box for your online life.
Morty is designed to hold all your information safe and secure during your lifetime. You add information, access it, update it, put stuff in, take stuff out, do the hokey pokey and turn around... And just like the bank deposit box if you live in an areas prone to natural disasters, all your important information is in one place so you can access it quickly and easily from anywhere.
However, unlike a physical safe deposit box, your family don't go through the nightmare of trying to get to the information they need after you die.
Instead, you set up beneficiaries for your information and a small number of confidants to verify your death. When you die your family contact us and we flick the switch (literally) and the security team go off and check with your Confidants to make sure you're actually dead (not in fact hiking Kiliminjaro and out of phone range).
When it's been confirmed you're actually dead your digital information is released to the people you've nominated.
Again, unlike piles of random stuff sitting in a bank box, you actually get to nominate who gets what, so you have control over your information, even after you're dead.
Protected by military-grade security and two-factor authentication, keeping your digital belongings in Morty is infinitely safer (and more practical) than hiding log-ins in cans in the backyard or sewing passwords into the hems of your curtains.
Brave is kind.